Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

That complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.

Women still routinely get passed over when everyone sits around the table and says, "What's our list of 10, 20, 30 directors that we wanna put at the top of our list for this project?" You need more people who are either women who care about this issue or men who care about this issue, who are sitting in this room and saying, "Guys, where are the women? We need to be going out to women." And particularly in the projects that really could use a fresh feminine perspective, whatever that ultimately means.

I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

Motherhood is this sort of "curtain lifting" of tremendous power that we have individually as women. It's tremendously freaky to have a human being grow inside your body and eventually turn into a human being, and then birth that human being, and then have them be separate from you. Those things are scary. It's also really, really scary to face the idea of losing a child and losing someone you love more than you've loved anything before. All of those things are innately really terrifying, and what it does to me is bring me to a direct kind of confrontation with my human vulnerability.

There's just so much lazy violence directed at women. But beyond that, lazy violence directed at humans generally. Just lazy violence.